The Artist

Ralph Hewitt Schofield (1921-2002) was a recluse in his later years, only leaving his hundred-year-old home to travel with his wife, Mary, to a secret fishing hole. “I’ve never been out of Utah,” he said. “I’ve never been out of this house, except to go to war. “ Even Mary was reared just three miles up the creek. “I don’t know why I paint, and I certainly don’t know why I paint what I paint,” he would tell you. He believed that most of nature is abstract. “A painting is a thing – a thing like a rock or a twig. It gets your attention, you like it, that’s it. It’s not expected to do anything more than that.” He never would talk about his time in the Marines as a combat illustrator, documenting the dead after battle, which made him a fierce pacifist.

But the Schofield’s tangled backyard nature preserve was the scene of many a wild party during the 1940s when Ralph was in art school. There was a punch bowl with heavy vodka and things would go on until sunup. Ralph would always shoot off one of his guns out by the creek at midnight on New Year’s and once was so drunk he winged one of the paintings hanging all the way inside on the living room wall. It was a valuable abstract by a noted artist but Ralph famously remarked, after seeing the damage, that it just made the painting better.

A veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he studied art on the GI Bill, first at the University of Utah for a year, then at the Art Barn, old home of the Salt Lake Art Center, for three more. He changed schools because, he said, “the U. of U. didn’t permit nude models.”

Known best as a painter whose most popular works are in the realistic tradition – cowboy-genre actors and U.S. presidents (in the Springville Museum of Art collection), mostly painted in groups, Ralph was also one of the state’s earliest and finest abstract painters.

-Ann Poore